Category Archives: Serbia

Gemius analysts have just recently published data on the number of Internet users in Central and Eastern European countries and calculated their internet penetration rate (they checked what percentage of the population are Internet users in a given country).

There were taken into account European countries, where Gemius conducts Internet research: Denmark, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria and Romania. The data comes from 2015 and refers to population aged 18-69 years (with the exception of Bulgaria, for which data refers to 15-69 years old people).

According to the estimates, the audited country where Internet users represent the largest percentage of population is Estonia. 86% of Estonians are active in the network. In the forefront there are also the Czechs and the Poles. Only every fourth citizen of these countries at the age of 15-69 years did not use the Internet. In turn, the country which recorded the lowest percentage of Internet users, is Romania – 58%.

Countries, where you can observe the greatest gender disparities in structures of Internet users, are: Serbia, Croatia, Romania and Latvia. In Romania and Latvia, males account for 53% of Internet users. On the other hand, in Serbia and Croatia women outclass men by even more percent points. Serbian females account for 56% of Internet users in their country, while Croatian females for 54%.

On the other hand, Moldova is a country where people aged 15-24 constitute the largest group of Internet users – 29%. In Ukraine the largest age group of Internet users are those aged 25-34 (29%). Every fourth Czech person using the Internet is 35-44 years old, every fifth Latvian is 45-54 years old and one in five Estonians is 55 years old or more.

In all the analyzed countries the greatest share in population of Internet users are people with secondary education. The leader of these countries is the Czech Republic, where representatives of this group are 67% of network users. The country with the highest proportion of Internet users among people with higher education is Ukraine – 4%. Meanwhile, the country with the lowest percentage of Internet users with university degree is Slovakia – 21%.

It seems that there is a big demand for job apps which target temporary/additional/student jobs. Many people are looking to find a job or extra job that they can do few hours per day. In our previous post we wrote about Polish app Jobsquare which gain traction very fast and as a result, got acquired.

Similar story is with job app Poslonaut from Serbia. They launched also in 2016 and gain traction in a short time. Infostud, the biggest job platform in Serbia, recognized big potential of the app and made a partnership with the Poslonaut team. They have now around 900 active ads and around 30 000 users in the app.

You must have heard of the saying in the title. People have always wanted to share good thing with others, however, until the Internet came around, especially with the rise of social media, we could share our experiences only with the people in our immediate vicinity. Today we know the situation is quite different. Power of an individual to create the image od someone or something has never been greater. That’s exactly the base of BeeShaper, platform I’m about to present you.

BeeShaper’s slogan is Peopleworthy campaigns. There you have the essence of the platform – it is the biggest e-WordOfMouth and blog network in South East Europe, with over 11 000 registered users who reach over 7.5 million internet users. Bee Premium Group, that BeeShaper is a part of, recently acquired three regional blogging platforms. That fact is of paramount importance for BeeShaper too, because it provides bloggers who can write a high-quality review of a product or a service.

BeeShaper wants to match a brand which wants to try this innovative promo and PR tool with the individuals who used the brand or like it. That’s always been advertisers’ goal – to avoid talking about their brand themselves, but to find people who already used it and liked it. That’s not just advertisers’ goal, that’s what the users want too – to read about the things they’re interesting in, from the people they trust. If we surveyed how many people liked watching commercials, what do you think how many of them would be affirmative? They would maybe say they like seeing a good commercial, which is unfortunately hard to find. How many of you change the channel when ads start rolling, or ignore banners while reading something? Or if you see a PR article in the newspaper? And how many of you ignore your friends’ social media statuses? You see the point.

If that’s the goal of both the advertisers and the internet users than it has to be also the goal of global Internet companies like Google and Facebook – to create a habitat where brands and individuals can easily communicate.

Individual users who participate in campaigns are called Shapers. They are profiled in 9 categories and 215 subcategories based on their affinities. That way you are sure that only relevant people are invited to join a campaign, to be brand’s online ambassador. This all increases the campaign performance. Like when we’re in high school and we want to be a part of the group that influences others, the same goes for advertisers – they should speak to those Internet users who are credible for a certain topic in their community, whose opinion is respected.

Estimated 150 billion dollars will be spent globally on online advertising. It’s not a question any more if the online advertising is necessary, because it is. It’s not even a question if it is going to dominate overall ad spend everywhere, like it already does in the UK. The only question is which promo channels are worth investing in, if you know that Google admitted that over 50% of online ads are never shown to real people (Quartz). Advertisers more often than not pay the views or impressions, and not for the campaign’s verified results.

BeeShaper was initially created as an in-house tool for promotion of their own clients, but for a little more than a year it is in available for all other marketing, PR, and media buying agencies as well. You can check out their corpo page and find additional information and the resons why BeeShaper should be an integral part of every serious online media plan, and why some of the biggest brands trusted them – Coca Cola Bloggers Network, Telenor, Banca Intesa, L’Oreal, Agrokor, McDonald’s etc.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, than a video is worth a thousand pictures, so you can watch this video to wrap up the story about BeeShaper.

Taxify, the leading taxi booking application in Northern and Eastern Europe is launching in Belgrade. Taxify is an Estonian based fast-growing mobile app, which allows to book a licensed taxi at the push of a button. Since late 2013 Taxify has grown to 10 countries around the world and attracted funding from multiple international investors (AdCash, RubyLight, TMT Investment, Pipedrive etc).

The new app helps people avoid long waiting times and “pirate” taxis by connecting passengers directly to verified drivers in their area. After confirming your order you can see the taxi moving on the map and you will receive a notification on its arrival. At the end of the trip you can give feedback about the driver to improve the quality of taxis available in the app.

In Serbia service is launching with 100 licenced taxi drivers and according to Dejan Bizinger, the Country Manager of Taxify in Serbia, it is looking to double the coverage in September. Dejan Bizinger comments:

“Considering the size of the market and the smartphone penetration, we see huge growth potential and demand from customers’ side. Moreover, we see that Belgrade has the same problems in the taxi market as we have seen in the Baltics – the quality of cars is unpredictable and there are a lot of inefficiencies which cause long queues on peak hours. By enforcing strict quality standards to our drivers, we are able to tackle these inefficiencies and provide best quality service to Belgrade taxi customers.”

For drivers and taxi companies, Taxify is a great way to find new customers at a very low price. It is not just additional marketing platform, but also fully featured dispatcher software which will bring taxi services to a different and better level. Taxify also aims to help traditional taxi companies and taxi drivers fight the growing threat on their business from independent driver service offered by Uber and the like.

Besides Serbia, Taxify currently operates in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Georgia, Mexico, the Netherlands and has recently launched the service in Czech Republic.

Taxify was recently nominated for The Best Smartphone App 2015 in the contest organized by Mobile Summit Estonia.

The world’s biggest ridesharing platform BlaBlaCar has announced they acquired a Hungarian startup Autohop and, therefore, now they are present also in Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Croatia.

BlaBlaCar is present in 16 countries according to their main page country selection and based on Crunchbase data so far raised 110m usd in 2 rounds, from some of the the world A-list investors like Index Ventures, Accel Partners among others.

BlaBlaCar is headquarted in Paris and in July 2014 got the biggest investment that one French startup ever got – 100m usd. It enabled to fast open new markets or to acquire existing market leaders.

Markets like above mentioned are great because GDP is significant lower than the average EU GDP but the transportation costs are pretty much the same so we can expect further growing a ridesharing community. However, question is how much they will be able to monetize platform in those markets comparing to some wealthier markets.

We will see if some new ridesharing platforms will evolve in this market but anyway, having the biggest player in this industry present in this market can most likely mean only better conditions to travelers as community will grow more and big and safe environment is the most important factors in ridesharing platform.